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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25370926">our fury burns</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laora/pseuds/Laora'>Laora</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>A distressing amount of blood, Body Horror, Gen, M rating for hella dark themes pls read with care, Minor Character Death, haunting AU</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 09:53:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,004</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25370926</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laora/pseuds/Laora</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Shibuya's corners are a little darker than you might think.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>35</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>our fury burns</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/MintGreenDreams/gifts">MintGreenDreams</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This fic was inspired by <a href="https://twitter.com/MintChini/status/1284126962043281408?s=20">this incredible art</a> by @MintChini over on Twitter! they were gracious enough to let me fic it, and...hoo boy did i run with these dark vibes</p><p>pls mind the warnings, basically i was going for <i>super fucking creepy</i></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You meet a boy, today. He's standing outside Cyco Records and staring listlessly through the windows - fiddling with something, his hands restless and jerky.</p><p><em>You all right, hon? </em>you ask, because you are a parent, and this boy can be no older than fifteen, and he's out here all alone. Every bone in your body is designed to worry after him.</p><p>He does not acknowledge your presence at all. You hesitate before deciding to move on. The city is loud, after all, so maybe he simply didn't hear you. A teenager probably wouldn't want anything to do with some middle-aged busybody like you, anyway.</p><p>You finish your shopping, hours later, and see the boy again on your way home. He hasn't moved an inch since this afternoon, and this time you resolve to help him. This can't be safe, and you <em>know </em>it isn't normal. You are a parent, and you are going to help.</p><p>The Shibuya sun beats down on the street just like it always does, and that must be why the boy seems to swim before you as you approach. <em>Hey, </em>you say, <em>what's wrong?</em></p><p>He does not so much as twitch. His eyes are glued to the headphones displayed prominently in the window, the ones you've sighed over again and again when your daughter - tech junkie that she is - begs you to buy them for her. They're expensive, you always argue. You'd be paying for CAT's brand, not for quality, and you refuse to pay that much to a corporation that has had a stranglehold on the city's trends for longer than you have been alive.</p><p><em>Hon, </em>you try again, and this time you reach for his shoulder. Your hand does not make contact before his head snaps up, eyes wide and bloodshot, to stare through you.</p><p>You see the vacant stare. You see the trails of blood, leaking from his ears and nose. You see a bullet wound through the middle of his forehead, mostly concealed by his mop of orange hair.</p><p>Somewhere, distantly, you see the broken, sparking headphones clutched between his blue and rotting fingers. You feel a scream tearing up your throat.</p><p>You hear something like radio static consuming the space around you. It fills every orifice and vessel and synapse close to bursting. You know <em>everything. </em></p><p>And then you are gone.</p><hr/><p>Some call her a demon, possessed and controlled by CAT to keep competition away from their precious stomping grounds.</p><p>Some - and these are only ever little girls, lost and lonely - say she saved them when they needed it the most.</p><p>No one is sure who she is, or where she came from, or even what she looks like. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is the stuffed cat she carries in cold, skeletal hands.</p><p><em>She gave me a hug when I was sad, </em>one girl says. <em>She told me I could be a girl even when everyone says I'm a boy, </em>says another, wrapping her arms around herself.</p><p><em>I told her that the other kids were being mean, and she promised she'd fix it, </em>another says in the police report. Days earlier, a school bus caught fire and killed a dozen of her classmates.</p><p>
  <em>She said she couldn't help me since I'm too pretty, I'm outgoing, I'm smart - </em>
</p><p>
  <em>She said that if she couldn't be happy as a designer, then I couldn't be happy either. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>She's tall and pretty, and her hair was pink - </em>
</p><p>
  <em>No she isn't! She's as short as me, and wears a green sweater - </em>
</p><p>So she's tall and she's short, and she only sometimes wears glasses. She either dresses conservatively or dresses with trends that haven't seen the light of day in years. Her hands, always, clutch at a stuffed cat who's falling apart at the seams. One of the button eyes is gone, and the white on its paws is dyed with fresh blood.</p><p>Her fingertips ooze from dozens of pinpricks, and there's thread tangled up and down her arms like chains. "I'll never be good enough," she says to one little girl. "You need to be better than me, okay?" And then she sets alight the child's abusive father as he stumbles toward them, drunk beyond reason.</p><p><em>"</em>You have to stay safe," she says, softly, as the child screams, and screams, and screams. "Mr. Mew and I will always be watching, just to make sure."</p><p>(Girls who survive meeting her swear that sometimes, the stuffed cat grows lethal, bloody claws.)</p><hr/><p>If you go to the underpass over by Miyashita Park too late at night, sometimes you never come home.</p><p>There's a monster there, all bright orange and jagged edges and <em>wrongwrongWRONG </em>that protects the area like a guardian angel. It gives you a chance - <em>one </em>chance - to turn around when it requests it.</p><p>If you refuse… Well, let's just say that your family won't even get a body to bury.</p><p>MY PARTNER WILL BE THE BEST SKATER IN THE WORLD, it says to you tonight, when you're paralyzed with fear at the mouth of the tunnel. I WON'T LET YOU STOP HIM.</p><p>The monster is small - maybe the size of a squirrel - but its form is incomplete, incomprehensible. It stutters in the dim illumination of your phone's flashlight, and when you try to take a picture of it, the image shows only static.</p><p>LEAVE, it tells you. You don't see a mouth within its corrupted form, but the message is clear nonetheless. Wisely, you take your own skateboard and turn around toward home.</p><p>.</p><p>The next day, under the bright sun, you return with some of your buddies to set up a drone and some cameras you nicked from your school's drama department. You may only be sixteen, but you're a stubborn bastard, and you know what you saw. If your friends won't believe you, then you'll just need to get them the evidence yourself.</p><p>Your friends laugh and joke as you direct them all on where to point the cameras, where you're sure the monster's <em>partner </em>must have been skating. They don't understand, but they will. They will.</p><p>You return home that night with plenty of time to spare, before the sun sets, to make sure the monster doesn't find you. You sit down at your computer, and crack open an energy drink, and pull up your video software. Your friends are sprawled across your room behind you, laughing and screwing around, just like always. They don't believe you, yet, but -</p><p>The underpass is quiet for hours. You've gone through three cans of Red Bull, and it's getting harder and harder to tune out the laughter behind you. What if they're right? What if you drank a little too much last night, and hallucinated the whole thing? God, you'll never live that down -</p><p>But then your video feed fuzzes white for a moment, lighting up the room and causing a couple of your friends to yell. When the screen clears, there's no sign of the monster. But there is a boy with ghastly gray skin, wearing a white muscle shirt splattered with blood, walking down the tunnel and holding a board.</p><p><em>What the fuck, </em>one of your friends whispers, and several people hush him before he can say any more.</p><p>The kid's your age, probably, though it's hard to tell with the crap video quality and the way he's wearing his beanie so low over his eyes. His movement's funny, too, like he's a badly controlled marionette. His steps are jerky, and his arms are clutched to his chest like he's holding something precious. The closer he gets to the camera, the more you realize his posture isn't just a regular teenaged slouch, and the tilt of his head is less boredom and inattention - it's more like a snapped neck.</p><p>He gets on his board and starts screwing around, but you scarcely notice the tricks he's pulling off. Your focus is entirely on his face. It's caked in blood, just like the rest of him, except for two vertical lines down his cheeks. You realize, when he gets especially close to the camera, that the distant wailing noise coming from your speakers is not the traffic going by overhead.</p><p><em>Dude, </em>one of your friends breathes from behind you, but you don't turn. <em>Who the fuck is that? </em></p><p>As if in answer, the video whites out again. LEAVE HIM ALONE, the monster's voice says, crackly and distorted and <em>furious</em>. HE'S BEEN THROUGH ENOUGH.</p><p>There's a nasty popping sound, and then your computer blue-screens; your whole setup's fried. Your speakers start emitting a horrible, high-pitched scream that echoes for several seconds after you dive to unplug them.</p><p>(For months, you have nightmares of a kid who looks like he lost a fight with a freight train, sobbing and clutching at a bell pendant like it's the only thing holding his world together.)</p><hr/><p>No one goes to WildKat Café more than once.</p><p>Oh, sure, it makes the best coffee in town, no contest. The owner, by all accounts, is a friendly if eccentric sort. It's on a busy street, packed with young shoppers who always want to try a new drink to keep them awake.</p><p>But there's just something about the shop that sets your teeth on edge, that raises your metaphorical hackles without even your subconscious knowing why. It's something about the way the barista smiles, sometimes, when he makes small talk with a customer who's desperate to leave. It's something about the way he has far too many teeth, all of them razor sharp.</p><p>It's something about the boy who hangs around the café, day or night, always scrolling aimlessly through an orange flip phone with a frown on his face. Something, probably, about the way his purple eyes blaze if you ever interrupt his trance.</p><p>"He's composing,<em>" </em>the barista tells you, when you ask, and smiles that smile that's just left of friendly. "He doesn't like to be interrupted."</p><p>The boy isn't wearing headphones, and his phone is so old that there's no possible way there's apps installed on it, anyway. But you look at the barista's teeth, and wonder what his eyes really look like behind those sunglasses. You look at the way the boy seems to <em>glow, </em>when you see him out of the corner of your eye. You think about how you're pretty sure the phrase <em>his presence drops the room's temperature by twenty degrees </em>was always supposed to be a figure of speech.</p><p>Wisely, you decide not to press.</p><p>"Thanks for visiting," the barista says, too cheerful, as you hurry out the door. "Have a good day!"</p><p>You see three gaunt, bloody teenagers waiting on the sidewalk outside. They stare at you for several seconds in silence before the boy with orange hair turns away and enters the café. None of them leave footprints from the puddle they were standing in, and the creature on the other boy's shoulder watches you with beady eyes.</p><p>You summon up the last dregs of your courage, and look through the window one last time before walking away. The spotless, pristine interior you stood in moments earlier is wiped out; it looks like a war zone, with tables overturned and blood splattered across the walls. The barista and all four teenagers are conspicuously absent.</p><p>You shudder, and turn away, intent on catching the next train home. Some things you cannot understand, and so your brain does its best to put those impossibilities behind you. Haunted cafés and bloody children are not a part of your worldview. They cannot be, and so they <em>will not be, </em>and you wipe at your face with your free hand before taking a step forward.</p><p>You never get further than that. Instead, the boy with the purple eyes stands before you on the sidewalk. Your coffee slips from your grasp, splashing to the pavement and scorching your legs. The pain is a distant afterthought to the universes you see in this boy's eyes.</p><p>He smiles at you. Then, he raises his gun.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>honestly i have not fleshed out this au any more than the words i put on this page so basically...go wild on personal headcanons this is all i've got!!</p><p>thank you for reading!! i am on twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/laoraahh">@laoraahh</a> if you wanna yell about twewy w me</p></blockquote></div></div>
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